Stop Paying For SaaS Features You Never Use With Dave Albert

Matthew Bertram sits down with David Albert of CRO Metrics to unpack what is actually changing across SEO, AEO, GEO, LLM visibility, and the modern stack as tools like Claude Code make custom apps and automations feel effortless.

• the shift from bloated martech stacks to custom AI middleware and small internal apps 
• why compliance, governance, and shadow AI access are now daily marketing risks 
• using guardrails and shared boilerplates to democratize internal tool building 
• turning years of experiment data into RAG search and predictive CRO scoring 
• how SEO, AI visibility, and paid traffic performance depend on on-site conversion work 
• practical signs a site needs CRO even when the ask is “more leads” 
• a modern definition of CRO built on statistical validation and incrementality 
• starter tools and simple first tests like headlines, CTAs, trust signals, and form friction 

Guest Contact Information: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidpaulalbert

https://crometrics.com/

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Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. 

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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Transcript

Welcome And The AI Rush

SPEAKER_00 0:03

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

Howdy, welcome back to another Funfield episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matthew Bertram. I am excited to be on today. There's a lot of things happening in the AI space. It's moving very, very quickly. Definitely with the AEO, GEO, SEO, LLM visibility, whatever you want to call it. There's a lot happening there with uh AI systems as well as search systems. Uh, more than has happened in the last 25 years. And now, really, this is, I think, going to be the year of agents. And um, a lot of things are happening where you're not just using LLMs to ask questions too, you're actually using things like Claud Code to actually build things and do things. And there's all kinds of tools out there like Replit, and you can add you can say a sentence and it will build you a little app or a widget. And everybody's trying to decide whether or not you're gonna build something or buy something. What is the future of SaaS look like? And so I thought I would bring uh David Albert on from uh CMO Metrics, who's kind of straddling that space. He's dealing with the AI SEO component as well as uh conversion rate optimization, which is very adjacent to what's going on uh in the SEO space. I know he does some SEO as well. Um, but really in the development space uh surrounding um, should you should you build your own tools or should you pay a bunch of software? So, Dave, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Hey Matthew, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

I love that you're outside. So everybody you can kind of hear some birds chirping. The weather is good in some places, uh, and uh uh excited to um just kind of have a discussion with a longtime agency owner of all the kind of things that are going through our head. It's it's every you know, every month uh it the landscape changes. So I'm curious uh what's on your radar? What are what are you looking at? What's happening in uh from your standpoint?

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Yeah, I think the uh the interesting questions that we're grappling with nowadays, especially as we're we're working with clients and even on our own business, is this idea of like you said, now that we have sort of clawed code entering the picture and a lot of these LLMs and really what AI and AI agents are enabling, is you know, the old world was like bio bloated stack and accept sort of the fragmentation between your systems or work on that fragmentation with the systems. The new world seems to be AI being able to make custom building far more realistic, uh, and the time that you can sort of get to market on those things is is just so rapid. And so it really gets down to that that answer of you know, thinking about it from the point of view of building selectively and then buying strategically, which is a new paradigm that I think that a lot of marketers really haven't been used to. You know, we've inherited kind of a lot of these systems, we know that they don't talk to each other. I don't know how many conversations I've had over the years uh where the number one complaint I get from clients is, you know, we have all this data and all the data is living in silos, and we need to figure out how to kind of unify all this data.

Commercial Readiness And Compliance Risk

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Yeah, no, I think MPC servers and kind of connecting everything together with Claude Skills is really um helping change that paradigm, as you you say. Um in that conversation, some of the conversation I've had with a number of clients is well, is it commercially ready? Right. So, like a lot of people are building tools, and if you're using it for internal use, that's one thing. But if you have high throughput and you're you're adding a lot of customer count, um, there's a lot of kind of compliance components, there's a lot of things to think about. And so a lot of people are throwing together an app or uh a piece of software, and then clients are getting really excited and are wanting to go to market with this, and then traditional developers are like, whoa, slow down. And then you have arguments like uh like base 44. We've been using base 44 a lot, which Wix bought it. And um, you know, I think that those are going to talk together. I think even like Mantis uh from an ad standpoint is really interesting. We've been asking it some questions related to Facebook ads, and so like there's this merger of a lot of these systems, and it's really like well, it's materially better than it was six months ago. And, you know, I can't remember. Uh I haven't done a podcast for about two weeks, but Claude Code took over um the world, right? And then Chat GPT sucked that up. And, you know, okay, Maltbot and everything else, if you're following the space closely, uh, you know, we got a Mac mini going, right? And now we're using some VPSs and we're building some different things, but you know, the development team's like, okay, slow down. Um, and clients are pushing pretty hard to say, okay, this is possible, just make it happen. And connecting all the pipes on the back end, making sure that stuff's not breaking. I I feel like it's moving incredibly fast. And we want to kind of pump the brakes from a risk standpoint and saying customer data and where is the stuff being processed, and you know, like like, do you need to build a model internally? And these are all questions that traditional marketers have not dealt with in the merger of um, you know, uh programmers and like content and SEO people, it's kind of all being blended together of what's possible. And so, like, how I know I threw a lot at you there, but like really the buyer build, where's the line for you on what's commercially ready and like what you should just maybe keep in-house for customizations?

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Yeah, I think that's a that's a great topic. And you know, obviously, you're not going to want to replace your core systems, right? I mean, to say, oh, we're gonna vibe code our web analytics app and replace, you know, Amplitude or GA4 or something like that, like certainly I don't think those things are wise or uh um areas that that folks should be really be pursuing. I mean, if it's core to your business, it's a core platform, you know, the idea is that's not right for replacement. I think a lot of what the technologies are offering us right now is things to be augmentitative to what we're doing, right? It is it is that ability to kind of stitch those systems together to like be that middleware and also be those little utilitarian tools or plugs that can kind of come in and help solve some novel problems. And I almost look at it, you know, from a governance standpoint, yeah. Totally understand what you're saying, you know, where there's a concern about security and who has access to these things and like what are they doing to these systems? And the way that I'm thinking about it, the way that we're trying to do it within our organization is to really sort of democratize this with some guardrails. And so an example of that is we rolled out um like a boilerplate to being able to do apps, and so that boilerplate uh has some security guardrails in it, it has some direction around how things should be coded, it has even some like UX UI considerations and stuff like that. And so as long as people are following the boilerplate, then we know some guardrails are being followed, but we it at the same time opens up that democratization of being able to buy code, right? I almost look at it as like a new spreadsheet in a way, because it's like, well, you wouldn't tell anybody, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't create a spreadsheet, right? Like, what are you doing? That's dangerous. Um, and it's and you also wouldn't worry about how many spreadsheets people are creating. It's like we all have a bazillion spreadsheets. So to me, it's like, well, this is sort of the next level. A lot of this mod coding is the next level, just doing spreadsheets, right? It's like I want to be able to solve something that maybe I would have used a spreadsheet for in the past, but now I can describe it to an LLM and it creates a much more multifunctional version of something that would have just been a pain to try to recreate with other software before.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Man, I have three quick things to respond on that. First is I definitely have clients that have vibe coded their own kind of GA4 replacement. And um that that has been an interesting conversation of like, this is how we're tracking now, and this is the data that we're using. I'm like, well, let's, you know, and you're talking about websites, right, that are that are built completely outside of a a known framework, right? It's just completely HTML code, um, which which has been an interesting conversation. Specifically, the kind of um bringing everything together component under one roof, I think is the core problem that marketers need to solve. And I went through like an executive um program through Harvard that that was kind of the core issue that they were trying to solve. So I think a lot of businesses are trying to figure out cleaning up that data, LOMs, it doesn't have to be that clean. Okay, we can move a little bit quicker. And so a lot of the data science stuff got slowed down uh when everybody's still cleaning up data. But now where are the hallucination hallucinizations coming from? Well, maybe we need to uh have a little bit more grounding. Um, but I think that that's like the key topic. And then from the guardrail standpoint, I can tell you to your point, um, to expand upon that a little bit. I I mean, my team was trying out a lot of different tools, and I was like, wait before you give that tool, whoever that is, whoever just stood that up, access to like all our Google Drive, all our emails, like everything that we have, because you don't know where it's being processed, who's ingesting it, what are you know, what are their terms of service. And and I think that once that information, like shadow AI, gets out there from a publicly traded company or you know, uh proprietary data how to do stuff, like once it gets into the LMs, I mean, I'm not sure how you get it back. Like, I'm not sure. Like, if you're it okay, you've clicked the button, don't train the model. I'm not sure. Like, I don't know how some of these LMs process information, um, you know, what where those lines exactly are on the terms of service. We're trying to really dig into that. But like once that information gets out there to a public LM and it gets updated and you've added proprietary information or you know, whatever out there, I don't know how you take that back. And I feel like that's a real concern um for for a lot of people. And you know, I feel like even your prompts, like your prompt library, is starting to become, you know, potentially uh um you know, IP to a certain degree.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Yeah, totally. I mean, and it you know, it's just getting worsened with um, I think you mentioned it earlier, like releases like open claw, where you know, kind of introducing this massive sort of security risk. And uh, if you saw recently NVIDIA release their own sort of version of OpenClaw, because they're really security, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

That that was cool. Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and and it's interesting to see uh, you know, obviously it serves the best interest of NVIDIA to release something like that, but at the same time, they're recognizing that, like, oh, this is the future, right? This is how companies are going to operate, this is how they're going to do business, and we need to figure out a way to make this safe for organizations. Uh, because I can only imagine, you know, the governance teams and the scrambling that the larger enterprise companies are grappling with right now, with all of the concerns you've just mentioned. Um, I think it's easier, obviously, for smaller organizations, smaller firms to act a little bit more entrepreneurial with this stuff, take a little bit more risk. But yeah, your concerns are absolutely valid in terms of once something gets out there, you know, it's out. There, it's Pandora's box, you really can't close it back up.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

Yeah, no, so so okay, let's go back to like um, you know, uh agencies, because a lot of people that are listening are at agencies and they're trying to figure out um how all this fits together. And if you're listening and you feel like you're behind, you are. Um uh, you know, basically it's moving really, really quickly. And so if you're starting to build custom GPTs, that's great, and you should be doing that, but that is from a research mode, not from a do mode. So there's gonna be this agent economy, I believe. And I I was involved in crypto and I think they're kind of merging, like frontier technologies are coming together. And even I don't know if it was McKenzie or who released a report saying last year was the year of the agents, and I think this year with OpenClaw kind of kicked it off. And now we're we're starting to see digital teams being set up, people integrating this stuff. And I mean, once a company gets AI enabled or AI first and starts to move, that gap's gonna get widened and widened and widened. And so I think you really need to stay on top of what's happening. I think where you where we were talking about in the beginning, can you build your own tools so you don't have this massive bloat in tech? And a lot of times people are paying a lot of money for models or sorry, SaaS products, and they're only using a component of it, right? And they're like, and it's not working for exactly what I want. And so I feel like there's this opportunity to customize and build what you need for your workflows in a way that that really benefits what you're trying to do. Like, I would love to hear kind of maybe some of the the just high-level stuff from a CRO standpoint of some of the maybe the full first tools that you were like, man, someone's not doing this. We have this internal capability, like, let's build this tool that does this thing. And I saw on your site too that you've started to trademark some stuff. And I'm just kind of curious, okay, like when you started to wrap your head around this and you said I can apply this to our business, where you went to first.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Yeah, I think on the CRO standpoint, well, to just to take a step back, I think where agencies should be thinking about this is really in terms of like first and foremost, what sort of proprietary data do you have access to, right? How can you leverage that data and how can you get your back-end systems in a place where you can sort of put AI on top of that data to really maximize its use? And so, an example from our business is we've been around for you know 15 years now, and we've run thousands and thousands of experiments for our clients. So you can imagine A-B tests, multivariate tests, personalization campaigns, all that good stuff. We uh have the foresight to keep all of that stuff into a in a database. So we've been collecting all of these experiments and all that data in a database for years, and so we we realized at some point, hey, wow, we're sitting on this mound of really great A-B testing data. Yeah, and so could we put AI in front of this? And you know, we kind of started where everybody else is is kind of doing it with these things, is it's like, okay, well, let's set up a rag system first, right? So, you know, if you have questions about past experiments or kind of what's worked for other clients or verticals or different things like that, we can enable chat so you can ask questions about the data. But then we sort of quickly pivoted to this idea of like, could we use AI and machine learning to train a model on this data to then predict the future success of new experiments, right? Um, so just kind of using priors to do that, and we found that we we we were able to train a model on that that both looks at a predictive analysis of of the likelihood of the test winning, but then also like what is the going to be the projected impact of that test. And so it sort of takes those two dimensions, marries them together, and sort of gives you a score of whether you should consider running that test or not. We call that impact lens. And we knew that the efficacy of that was going to be a longitudinal study, right? Because you roll something like that out, and it's like, well, you gotta run experiments, you have to bring them to statistical significance. Like, this is gonna take a while to get a number of experiments in the hopper that we've scored using these algorithms to say whether or not this works. And we did find interestingly that over time we actually saw not only the predictions match with reality, but that the efficacy of the tool kind of increased the more data that we were able to learn and train on it over time. So that's just one example. I mean, the the advice I would give agencies is really start with like looking at hey, do you have data that you're sitting on that could be useful? And think about creative ways that you could leverage that data. It could be re you know, uh the ability to do client research for clients, competitive analysis, or uh research that you could then use to create unique differentiating strategies. You know, there's kind of all kinds of things to be thinking about with this.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

I I love that. There's there's another tool out there. Um, I'll I'll give it to you after after this call, but essentially I think someone set up, I think it was like 10,000 uh like profiles, right? All different like people, and you can then take that the the the thought or the thing that you want to test, right? The hypothesis, throw it into that, and then see how they talk to each other, how they connect, and and kind of see what happens to the model. I think taking that data combined with like what you have uh give could give you like a even fuller picture of that impact. Because I think that a lot of people are gonna want to say, well, what is the synthetic test or what does the model say before we spend a dollar on ads? Right. Like I like from an ad standpoint, you're starting to be able to create the tools, they are amazing on like you could take a product and you could create all these different um ads uh in different placements, do the all these different things. And now you can like run that test to say, okay, like what what is the what is the likelihood or variance that we think we're gonna get with this? And that's something I think that the business side um uh of of companies wanna wanna see when they look at marketing. So it's not as soft, but it's really like you know, here's that investment of what it's gonna do. And so it's something tangible. And I think that that's why if you even say SEO versus paid ads, is why paid ads tends to get more budget because it's more concrete on what the output is and where those influences impact. I mean, have you like how do you view it when you're looking at data sets and you're running tests? Like, have you I I I you know paid ads is you set up the test, you run it, but like when you're doing CRO testing, um, how do you look at the comparison between paid ads and SEO?

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Yeah, great question. I mean, I I think that they all what we try to promote is they really all work symmetrically together, right? I mean, the idea is that you want to drive traffic to the website and you ultimately want that traffic to convert. And so obviously, SEO is and and AI visibility is going to help get that qualified traffic into the website. Paid ads are going to get that traffic into the website, and then once they're on that website, what is that optimal user experience that gets them to convert? And so we're trying to make sure that kind of all of those things converge in a way. And I do think that we're going to see kind of a wave of predictive analysis hit us. You know, if this year is the year of the agents, I mean maybe next year is the year of predictive analysis. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 21:35

Who knows?

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Totally. And so I, you know, I could really see a world in which we're seeing more predictive analysis with paid ads and the propensity for a paid ad to be successful. I could see that with SEO as well. I could see uh, you know, a lot of these AI visibility tools now are providing recommendations as to specifically like, you know, we this is all the things that we found. This is how we cited it. Here's what to go do about it. And it would be interesting to see some predictive modeling go into some of those tools to sort of stack rank that stuff, right? Uh, rather than um, I mean, I'm I want to use the word arbitrary. I don't think it's it's being recommended arbitrarily, but really like, is there some sort of algorithm or methodology to what's being suggested and the likelihood it has of being successful relative to that suggestion? Right. And getting back to what you're talking about with some of the simulation stuff.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

So, so the LLM TXT file, right? Txt file, right, right? Like there's a big debate on whether or not that that's useful. None of the models have said that they look at it, but there's probably a high likelihood they do, and there's a less high likelihood that they'll tell us. Um, and so like that recommendation's being pushed out there, but there's no concrete data one way or another of like what's going to happen with that. Uh, one of the things I think that's real tangible that I feel like is important from a CRO standpoint, right? So people talk about SEO, but when I have companies approach from a lead gen standpoint from an SEO, they're not asking for rankings. They're not, they're asking for leads, they're asking for new business. And and that's like the full package. And so a lot of times when we're talking to clients, we say, well, you got SEO. Well, then we need to transfer over to CRO at a certain point. Once we get enough traffic, we need to start doing CRO. Now with AI overviews and LLM visibility and all this kind of stuff, like you don't get as much traffic to your website. So you really need to focus on that transactional component of getting them to click and getting them to your website. And I feel like CRO, like if they were 50-50, let's just say CRO is now 75-25 because you know, you're getting one and one. Well, let's just say you're getting 25% of the traffic. I'm just, you know, I'm you know, I'm I'm just arbitrarily picking a number here, but I'm saying you're getting 25% of the traffic you were getting before, or a third, let's say a third. People can go with that. You're getting a third of the traffic you were getting before. Now, once they're on your site, they're like, that's gold, right? You're like, what are they doing once they're on their site? Let's look at the heat mapping, let's look at the flow. GA4 actually has a lot of ways to see stuff that I think that I would encourage people to go um get get re-educated on GA4 because they've there's a lot of data in there. It's just kind of hidden, it's kind of in a different spot, but you can see the funnel movement of what people are doing, but it's all CRO. It's like we got this person here, they're probably ready to buy, they've came through a transactional click. Okay, now they're gonna buy here or they're in the comparison phase. Like we got to capture them now. And you know, there's there's tools that that you know help you uh get some additional insights, but I feel like a lot of websites we've been seeing recently and a lot of clients that come to us, CRO is not what they're asking for. It's not what's on their radar, and it's probably the most important thing that they should be doing.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we we've been preaching that for years, even before AI was a thing, right? Uh, you know, if you looked at the studies, it was like this is one of the highest ROI things that you can be doing that is not a massive investment relative to other things that you're pouring money into, right? People pouring money into obviously running paid ads, it's one of the most expensive things you can do. And then even a lot of the investments from uh the standpoint of data infrastructure and the Martech stack and all the sort of data engineering that people are pursuing to kind of, like I said at the beginning, stitch all these systems together. And you look at all of those investments relative to what people are actually investing in conversion rate optimization, and it's like, you know, the the currow optimization piece is minuscule compared to that. And it's like, yeah, but this is like one of the highest leverage things that you could be doing. And so I think a lot of it comes down to um, I don't know if it's just not as sexy of an area as some of these other ones, or it's just people look at it as something that's harder to do than some of these other ones, but it's it's always kind of been interesting to us being mostly a crow firm of the sort of you know, kind of prevailing um perception out there of crow and and really what people should be investing in.

Signs You Need CRO

SPEAKER_02 26:40

Well, to your point, if you're looking at customer acquisition costs, right, and you're spending a bunch of paid ads, and you know, a lot of people just like to throw more money at it and and go, okay, well, this is how much people we're getting through our funnel. So let's just throw more money at it and we'll get more people through it. It's like, well, what what is what is your benchmark versus competitors or the industry? And go, like, how leaky is your funnel? Why don't we uh spend the same amount or spend less and convert at a lower rate? Um, and then and then you you maximize and and get that leverage. I'm curious, um, when you look at a client or your team's prospecting or whatever, what is like the identifiers that people are listening that hey, I might need CRO? Because I I feel like it it hasn't been enough on people's radar to know they need it. I mean, no one calls me, and you know, um, and I'm just we're just one agency, so you know, but no one calls me going, I need a CRO. Like they might need it, it's very clear that they need it, but they're just like I need more leads, we need someone to manage our PPC, we need someone to manage our SEO, but CRO should be part of that conversation, and it never is. So, like when you're talking to people, like how do you like when you're looking at a side or identify it, what are the like top three things or whatever that people go, oh, I probably should be looking for CRO?

SPEAKER_01 28:11

Yeah, I mean, I think any website that has a transactional component is a candidate for CRO, you know, or not. Um, so if whether that's a B2B website and your goal is lead acquisition, or if it's an e-commerce site and your goal is uh you know maximizing AOV or getting people through the checkout, um if you're a subscription site and you're really looking to get that recurring, you know, subscription uh revenue generated, anything where there's a transactional component, which is the other than informational websites or potentially media websites, and you know, a lot of media websites have a subscription component. I mean, that is the vast majority of websites out there.

SPEAKER_02 28:59

Yeah, uh, yeah, you're right. On the on the on the pay or on the um e-commerce side of things, I I think it's a lot more prevalent. And I guess um from that side, we have kind of two sides of the house. And so I'm more on the B2B side. Uh, so so that crossover is is not as strong. Certainly, I interviewed uh somebody on the Google team right before Google, and they basically laid it out and said, look, every website should have a cart of some kind, that's where the future is going. You need to have a transactional component on every website. It shouldn't just be uh you know a flyer, right, for your business. But there's a lot of um uh I would say um B2B businesses that are quite complex in their uh sale. Um and I think the sales team doesn't look at the marketing team the with the same level, they like look at it from maybe a brand standpoint or a you're we're going to a conference, we need some graphic design standpoint. Like from a B2B standpoint, how what where would you categorize CRO? Like how would how would those conversations happen? Because I mean, the website's carrying a lot more weight these days than give it to the salesperson, have them call because a lot of times people don't even want to answer the phone until they know what what the agenda is and who you are, and they're overloaded with other stuff. So the website has to do the heavy lifting in the odd times where people are going to do their own research and definitely people are starting to ask the AI and are relying on the AI for recommendations. I think everybody's gonna have their own personal AI assistant at at some point in the future. Um, and so it's like, you know, I need to talk to the AI and make sure that the AI uh knows what I do and how I do it. And and then if someone's gonna actually click on that, which is a high value click because it's recommended by the AI, um, like I need to make it really easy for them to take some kind of action or or get to the next step in the customer journey.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is on certainly on the CMO's mind. We have a person who is on our board of advisors who is the CMO for one of the largest B2B SaaS companies on the planet. I won't I won't name them, but uh just to kind of protect her confidentiality. But uh, she was just at South by Southwest and said that this, you know, if if her peers, B2B CMOs, this is all they were talking about, right? This idea of not only this idea of AI visibility and the fact that everyone is doing research for providers through AI now, and that's really how they're coming to the site. So how you're represented in AI and who gets recommended is of paramount importance. And then ultimately, this idea of when you get to the website of the companies that you're researching, is it validating what the AI told you, right? Is is your intent being reinforced? And then is it easy for the uh person to get answers and also easily get in touch with you? And so I think that if you're thinking about that customer journey, um that is just so important because the you know, an AI telling you, oh, well, here's the phone number of a sales associate at you know, XYZ company, like that's that's not really happening, right? They're gonna be sending you to that website and you're armed with some information ahead of time. You already have a notion of what you want to accomplish and and the type of solution that you're looking for. And the job of that website is to really validate that and move you to the next stage. And so I think CRO is really one of the ways that you can do that, where you're making sure that the site is optimized and you're seeing the maximum potential for you to get that information.

SPEAKER_02 33:14

So, so what I we probably should have done this at the beginning of the podcast, but I would love to get your definition today of what CRO is and what like encompasses it today.

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I I look at CRO as I mentioned it earlier, things like A-B testing, uh, multivariate testing, and personalization, right? But I think it's anywhere where there is sort of a scientific, somewhat of a scientific rigor to the process where you can validate statistically that the changes that you're making to the site are having are actually moving. They're they're having a sustained impact to the type of conversion or transaction that you're trying to promote, right? And so it's that sort of scientific rigor that um comes underneath it. And I think you can you can obviously do that through A-B testing and making sure that the variant that you're testing is statistically significant, but there's other kinds of um ways to do that and with other channels, right? There's uh incrementality is a huge thing in paid right now, and we've built models around um being able to measure incrementality uh in running paid campaigns. So it really is another form of being able to A-B test uh not necessarily on the website itself, but a channel outside the website to make sure that you have ad optimization campaigns that ultimately sort of build the amount of traffic that you're getting to the website, which then of course you're hoping to convert from.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

Yeah, let's um maybe share like a generalized case study that uh everybody could could uh identify with of um you know one of the one of the things that you've done, you have some great clients. One of the things that you've done that everybody could go, oh man, like this is why I should be thinking about CRO.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Yeah, I I think oftentimes we do we do get called when clients say, Hey, our paid is underperforming, right? And they're either um they're either someone at an organization who has familiarity with crow and can be an internal champion. So where they've they've run crow programs before and they recognize the importance of it and the amount of ROI that you can get from running a successful crow program, or there's someone with that challenge of, hey, we're spending all this money on ad campaigns and they're not performing very well. Um, and I think I could get a lift through the website as a as a part of that journey. Uh, so really like help me figure that piece out. So a lot of times, you know, to give you go back to the case study example, we've developed crow programs that are almost 100% focused on the paid converting the paid traffic, right? And so being able to look at that customer journey of where are they seeing the ads? And you know, as you know, the the customer journey is very fragmented now. You mean you might see something on Instagram, uh, scroll past it, and then you know, you're thinking about it a few days later and you Google it, and then an ad comes up for it, and you click through on the ad. And so that that click through wasn't your first exposure to it, right? It was already that seed was already kind of planted in your mind. Um, and so it's really thinking of that entire ecosystem of like, how can we optimize for that traffic coming from paid? Um, and make sure that when they're coming to the site, that experience is optimized and also reinforces like you are in the right place, right? That that um symmetrical sort of messaging between the ad platforms and the destination.

SPEAKER_02 37:18

Yes, that has been like the words need to match for the for the most part. Yeah, it's a very simple thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 37:25

But people are amazed at like how uh uh effective it is.

Simple Tests And Starter Tools

SPEAKER_02 37:29

No, I mean there's trust. Anytime you click to another website or a subdomain, I mean, the branding's got to be the same. Like you you lose a little bit of people every time uh you you kind of you you click away from stuff. I I would love, I have one or two more questions for you before we wrap up. And I know that you have a lot of experience with Optimizely, and I feel like we should give some people maybe some actionable steps that are listening of something they could do on their own. And if they need heavy lifting, of course, reach out to Dave. Um, but like what are some things, basic things that people maybe should be doing that you're surprised that they're not doing? Maybe, you know, one or two little tools that they can use in the browser or plugins or you know, on the back end of WordPress to help them get a little bit uh closer to optimization.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Yeah, I mean, I I think a lot of it does come down to the size of your organization, the team that you have, the resources that you have available. But really, if you're looking to kind of get something stood up and doing it in a in a somewhat scrappy way, I mean, optimizely is a great tool, um, but there are other tools on the market that are the barrier to entry is a little bit lower just in terms of of cost, where you can start with one of these, uh those types of tools and then sort of graduate into the optimizely's which provide a lot more functionality. We use um post hog with some of our clients, we use convert with a lot of our clients. Uh, some clients are on VWO. Um, those are a little bit more lower cost, more entry-level sort of tools that people can stand up. And then I would say, you know, once you've got a tool in place, like really just kind of start with um with basic tests, right? Like, don't try to plan out something that is kind of high level of complexity or overwhelming for the beginning, or saying, like, yeah, I want to completely reimagine the homepage, and we're gonna we're gonna have the control version of our current homepage and a completely reimagined homepage for the variation. We're gonna see how that does. And it's like, well, you spent all this time building this new homepage, and like, what if it loses, right? So, like, start, you know, change your headline, right? Like, change what your H1 says, change your CTAs, change what your subheads say. Think about how you're positioning elements on the page, what needs to be most important uh top? How are you incorporating things like social proof into your pages, right? What are those trust signals, those reinforcement signals that when someone's there, they can say, like, oh, yes, these this company is credible. They are trustworthy, right? I want to take the next step. Um, think about friction points in the user experience, right? Are you are you making people click through a bunch of things? Are you do you have too many elements on your forums? Are you just asking for way too much information? Um, so it's really kind of just thinking about like putting your customer hat on, going through your website as a customer and thinking like, if I was a customer interested in my product or service, how would I be interpreting this experience? Right? Would I be turned off at this point? Um is this kind of hard to accomplish sort of the task that I want the user to take and really think about it through that lens and then come up with a bunch of simple tests.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

Dave, I I am surprised when I asked a similar question to that of like go through your website as a customer. How many clients don't do that enough? You know, go through it and see if you would buy from yourself, right? And that's like where you should start. Um, many times we'll like start optimizing a website, and people like, what is like, what is this content? I was like, that was on the page, like that's what was there, and all right, you know, so um, so so Dave, great, great advice. So is there anything part of this conversation? Uh, and I definitely want you to um highlight ways to follow you, ways to get in touch with you, uh CRO metrics doing some great things. Um, is there anything that we should add to this discussion that that we didn't cover today?

SPEAKER_01 41:50

Uh no, I think um I think this has been been been great. Um, you know, but I think a lot of kind of again, what I've really been thinking about is is what I see so often is people kind of having all of these disparate data sources, being wanting to sort of tie all that data together. So I do think like as we started the conversation, AI is a really great way to be thinking about like how you can sort of stitch those things together through vibe coding and apps and things like that. And that really, you know, kind of getting back to your question of how to get started in curl. I mean, that's another element of it, right? Is if you feel like you have a good data model, like that kind of sets you up for that, those next steps. Um, and so I think you know it sort of all ties together in that way.

Where To Follow Dave Closing

SPEAKER_02 42:40

Awesome. And Dave, how do people find out more of what you're working on and what you're doing? What are some good channels?

SPEAKER_01 42:46

Yeah, I mean, uh our website is uh chrometrics.com. Um, so you know, feel free to to check us out there. Um, you can find me on LinkedIn. Uh my handle is David Paul Albert on LinkedIn. That's that's kind of pretty much the only place I sort of socialize. I hang out and post things. And so feel free to follow me there.

SPEAKER_02 43:08

Awesome. Well, Dave, thank you uh so much for being on the show. Uh, everyone, uh, until the next time, if you want to grow your network or your business or your brand with the most powerful tool on the planet, which I used to say it was the internet, but I think it's probably going to be AI and AI agents. Um, reach out to bestseopodcast.com. We'll connect you uh with the right agency. We focus mainly on CNI businesses over at EWR. Dave's great for CRO and metrics. It depends what you need. There's a flavor for everybody out there. There's a lot of need today. So find someone you know, someone you trust. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.